Privacy Digest

Whistleblower: Voting Machine Company Lied to Election Officials About Reliability of Machines - Via Threat Level:

A former technician who worked for Hart InterCivic -- a voting machine company based in Texas -- has alleged that his company lied to election officials about the accuracy, testing, reliability and security of its voting machines. The whistleblower says the company did so because it was eager to obtain some of the approximately $4 billion in federal funds that Congress allocated to states in 2002 to purchase new voting equipment under the Help America Vote Act (aka HAVA).

The technician, William Singer, filed a qui tam lawsuit on the federal government's behalf last year but the lawsuit remained sealed until today, according to the Associated Press, when the U.S. Attorney's office decided it would not join Singer in the litigation. Singer maintains that Hart was paid federal money under false pretenses for the eSlate machines it sold to states. He's now pursuing the case without the government and, according to a voicemail message that one of his lawyers left me, he's now doing so in conjunction with Robert Kennedy, Jr. If Singer wins and Hart InterCivic is forced to return funds to the federal government, Singer stands to obtain a percentage of those funds as a party to the suit.

According to the complaint filed in the lawsuit, Singer worked as a computer technician for Hart from 2001 to early 2004 when he says he resigned due to the company's fraudulent acts and misrepresentations.

Among the claims he makes:

• Hart didn't completely alpha test its software and didn't beta test its software at all.
• Hart created a "dummy" machine to undergo certification testing in Ohio because he says its standard system configuration would not have passed certification. Hart then didn't upgrade its standard system to match the system that passed certification.

• The Ohio certification requirements mandated that voting machines be able to produce a certain kind of report that the Hart machine couldn't produce. So Singer says Hart created a dummy report by hand and told certification officials that it came from the voting system.
• After Singer discovered that the eSlate's audit logging function, known as BOSS, generated invalid entries -- thus rendering the audit trail ineffective -- the company patched the software in some jurisdictions without telling customers it was changing the software and without submitting the changes for certification.
• Special voting units that Hart designed for disabled voters to use "were particularly prone to lose votes due to system design flaws that were well known within Hart," which Hart concealed from customers.

Singer also refers to Hart InterCivic as a foreign company but doesn't explain in the complaint who the foreign owner is.

Pete Lichtenheld, spokesman for Hart InterCivic, says that none of Singer's allegations are true and describes Singer as a disgruntled employee who had trouble getting along with fellow workers. He says Singer didn't resign because of ethical issues at the company but because he was angry that the engineering team excluded him from the process of creating builds of its voting software.

"He was in charge of building PCs for customers," Lichtenheld. "He'd get angry because someone else put a PC together to go out."

As for Singer's specific allegations Lichtenheld says the company did conduct in-house testing of its system, which he, as a former member of the company's training team, participated in first-hand. He also says that the BOSS audit system never produced invalid entries that he knows of and that any time the company changes its software, it submits the change to authorities for certification.

"Singer left the company in 2004," says Singer. "I think it's interesting (that) that's four years ago. It's a good sign of the depth of his disgruntlement. And the government didn't join the lawsuit, so that's a sign right there of the lack of faith they have in this lawsuit."

Lichtenheld adds that Hart InterCivic is not a foreign company but is wholly owned by Americans.

Singer's lawyers were unavailable to respond to a call for comment before publication.

(Hat tip: John Gideon)

See also:

• William R. Singer v. Hart InterCivic, Inc.

• Report" Magnet and PDA Sufficient to Change Votes on Voting Machine
• CA Releases Results of Red-Team Investigation of Voting Machines: All Three Systems Could Be Compromised

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)